
However, China’s turn toward traditionalism initially faced resistance. Throughout the
1970s and 80s, censorship was less restrictive, and the public made critiques of the government
during the 1978 Democracy Wall Movement, marking the onset of the so-called “Beijing
Delury contends that after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, the state
leveraged Confucianism to reinforce patriarchal governance and legitimize conservative
Deng sought to distinguish economic liberalization
from social liberalization, fearing
the latter could destabilize China’s newfound prosperity.
China’s economic system was not
capitalism, Deng claimed, but “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” using Chinese cultural
exceptionalism to justify his opposition to western democracy.
After 1989, Confucian studies
institutions proliferated, and by the 1990s, the CCP invoked Confucian ideals to “define the
substance of ‘Chinese characteristics.’”
months after the Tiananmen massacre, Deng
gave a speech at a government-sponsored celebration of Confucius’s birthday in which he
championed the sage’s ideal of “harmony.”
in 2002, Chairman Jiang Zemin gave his
final address to the National People’s Congress, declaring that China had become a “society of
moderate prosperity,” borrowing from the language of Confucius’s
claims this declaration was a conveyance of the “increasing heterogeneity of the sources of CCP
ideology,” which had by then embraced state-controlled capitalism, papering over the country’s
newly adopted economic policy with ancient aphorisms.
Six years later, the Opening
Delury has an interesting reading of this term, “moderate prosperity” (
claims that Jiang’s usage of the term “actually undermined the Confucian ideal even as the CCP seemed to be
moving in a neo-Confucian direction (by using a classical buzzword)” since it had been originally used to describe
“the unjust, imperfect world Confucius saw around him” which he compared to “the utopian vision of ‘great unity’
in which rulers and ruled worked together
to achieve a shared concept of the common good.” This
vision of “great unity” had adherents from all fronts of Chinese reformism, including in Sino-Marxism. Thus,
Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”
Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”
Hagström, “Harmony and the Quest for Soft Power,” 510.
Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; Westad and Chen,
The Great Transformation,
Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; Westad and Chen,
The Great Transformation,
Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; David C. Turnley, Peter Liu, Peter Turnley, and Melinda Liu,
(Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989): 19.